the best, they are by no means the biggest; they are not the most arresting in the sense of being the most ambitious. They are arresting because the great war really is great, and moves an imaginative spirit to great issues; it is public but it is very far from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily[Pg 8] more important as a private event even than as a public event. And the few but fine lines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered man from man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events take their place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneous type of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not by space, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in a metaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphor of the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye, not by quantity but by quality; and in any picture or pattern a spot or streak of it will make itself the feature or the key. Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a broken spectrum or a gap in coloured glass; feeling the whole range of vision to be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His own mysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.

[Pg 8]

Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by the two poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace being comparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short; short but sharply pathetic with its notion of peering and probing for the microscope flowers that must be a part of the most utilitarian vegetables. Indeed the short poems are certainly the most successful; and there is the same brevity in the last line of the poem about the tragic passage of time; "If lips of children had not told me so." The same general impression, as in the comparison already noted, is conveyed, for instance, in[Pg 9] the fact that the poems about South Africa are private rather than public poems; are in that sense, if the phrase be properly comprehended, rather colonial than imperial. That is, they are individual glimpses of great torrid wastes, like similar individual glimpses of quiet northern woods; visions of crude and golden cities as personal as the parallel visions of normal northern cottages. Miss Sibyl Bristowe is perhaps an amateur, in the sense in which this is generally true of one who happens to be an artist in another art; but it is unfortunate that the world has so much missed the notion of that natural ardour that should belong to the word.

[Pg 9]

 

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